Deep Practice and Myelin Magic

I am reading an amazing book called ‘The Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle, subtitled ‘Greatness isn’t born, it’s grown. Here’s how.’  There are many amazing nuggets of information in this gold mine.  I am going to touch on only two, that have turned my life upside down in a incredible manner.

Deep Practice:

My perspective has changed quite drastically on the subject of practice. Even though I have always know the adage “Practice makes Perfect”, I guess I never took it seriously enough, or I did not understand how excellent perfect has to be or I didn’t understand how practicing is a constant on-going thing or maybe a bit of all three. As most people, I have many talents, but they have largely gone untapped because of my ignorance of the importance and concept of ‘deep practice’. As David so eloquently explains it, ‘deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted way – operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes – makes you smarter…. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities, to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does.”

I first understood deep practice from Shin’ichi Suzuki’s books about teaching violin and Ed Sprunger’s book called ‘Helping Parents Practice’. Dr. Suzuki eureka moment was noticing deeply how children learn their mother-tongue with no formal training. Suzuki found this to be a miracle, while most people took it for granted. He went on to create the Talent Education philosophy that “Every child can” and his vision was to grow the children of the world with noble character through the violin as the means, to teach them discipline, hard work, persistence, how to overcome obstacles, etc. His thoughts were that just as elegantly and simply as the child learns the mother tongue, the child will learn the violin. The child has to listen to beautifully articulated recordings of the repertoire and build their ear. They learn their pieces by ear. They are also expected to do a lot of repetition with repertoire they have already learned. Practice is about repeating something over and over again to reach excellence. Another important reason for practicing known repertoire repeatedly is that one can reach for change, target a failure and turn it into a skill while playing pieces thoroughly known to the student.

Anyone curious as to how and why this style of practicing works? Why is it that Suzuki believed that ‘every child can’? Isn’t talent something you are simply born with? David traveled the world to talent hotbeds to gauge what the common factor is between them. He traveled to see talented soccer players in Brazil, violinists in New York, tennis players in Russia, etc. The commonalities were that they practiced differently (deeply) , and were passionate enough to put in the hard work, the struggle over the long haul. There were hardly any geniuses or prodigies to be found. Also, the missing link as David Coyle explains is a wonderful substance called myelin.

Myelin (the deep practice cell):

Myelin is the insulation that wraps the nerve fibers in our brains and increases signal strength, speed and accuracy. According to Dr. George Bartzokis, who spoke with David ‘Myelin is the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human.’ We used to attribute these functions to neurons, but what has been evolving is this new understanding that as skill develops, it builds thicker and thicker myelin around the nerve fibers, which make the skill better and more efficient. All the talent hot beds practice deeply and therefore in turn myelinate at a higher level over the long term. This builds mastery. Building myelin takes time, and putting ourselves in a position to fail, fix our mistakes and fail better and continue this process until we accomplish the task is one of the quickest and most efficient way to build myelin. Skill can now be redefined as ‘myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals’, the two are married together.

What has this information taught me? I must do daily what I love to do and develop skill in those areas that matter to me. Deep practice can be applied to careers, learning a language, writing, playing an instrument, playing a sport, etc. I think it is critical to establish what it is I am passionate about, focus on those few things, not waste my time and energy on obligations rather than priorities, and be willing to work hard, struggle and attain mastery in my special talents. I think more importantly that I must teach my children to do the same. It is so easy to entertain ourselves to oblivion and waste what little time we have on this earth. I believe that there is no one right way to live, we have to each blaze our own trail, but it is vital we live our life with some purpose and poise. Myelin through deep practice gives us the opportunity to develop our own special uniqueness and share it with world. Are you willing to take this opportunity?